Cork Christmas Trees

Through most of our Thanksgiving break one (or both) of the boys were fighting some kind of bug. Not so fun for a holiday weekend, but on the other hand it did mean we got some much needed downtime at home.

On one of the days it was clear we needed something fun and festive to perk us up, which is why I pulled out the materials for these Cork Christmas Trees.

They were a quick, easy to assemble craft that definitely has us thinking about Christmas already. 

The inspiration came from the Cork Painted Ornaments we made last year.  Using flat, cork tiles meant for creating bulletin board spaces we discovered you could easily cut the 1/4 inch tiles with kitchen scissors. For this project we added some wine corks to serve as trunks. 

Materials:

Flat Cork Tiles

Wine corks

Flat gems/sequins

White glue

Knives

Kitchen scissors (or other rugged scissors) 

permanent marker/pencil 

First I used the permanent marker to trace Christmas tree shapes onto the cork. I then used the kitchen scissors to cut the shapes out. Using the serrated knife (a bread knife works well) I cut the wine corks in half. 

The next part proved to be a little trickier. Using a large knife I cut two small, parallel lines into the top of the cork. Using a slightly smaller knife I carefully dug out the space between the two lines. Please note- all of the cutting jobs are definitely meant to be grown-up tasks and should be done carefully.

Now the boys could decorate their trees. Using the small Elmer's glue squeezers they carefully decorated the fronts of their trees with the gems. 

They each had their own process for gluing the gems on. Big Brother decided to look for "Christmas" colored gems while Little Brother looked for ones he really liked. They both added quite a few gems to their trees. 

We then decided it was best to let the glue dry before we stood the trees up. 

Once the glue was dry on the tree I used the hot glue gun to add a small line of glue into the space on the small cork half. I placed the tree standing up vertically into the glue. In just a few moments we had sparkly, standing trees. 

There's something I just love about how the gems stand out on the cork. For now we've only made a few of them, but I love the idea of making a whole forest of little, sparkly trees. 

Where might you decorate with these in your house?

This post may also have been shared at some of these terrific link parties.